Destination

"ut I'm already in hell." She laughed, as the wind got up.

Sitting on the dripping, cold steps of Leicester Station, sharing a joint with a new girlfriend, waiting for our long delayed motivation. This Saturday night is scattered with drunks and moonlight and for once, we are not the drunkest; we do not smell the worst. Late-night, paranoid tourists don't even stare---a few ask for directions. We are spreading our wet, waiting bodies all over that stone, watching stumbling silhouettes wrestle with the escalator.

She shuffles up the steps with the last of her strength. Her pink sweatpants are tinged with brown, and her feet are buried in city-stained bunny slippers. Her eyes look like they've seen so much sadness they're forever doomed to apathy. They are eyes dazed with the work it takes to stay warm, and weary of the excess of privileged people. Like a face in dreams, I'm looking at those glass eyes and thinking that she reeks of survival; that I'm too cold to move, and all I'm doing is waiting for the first train home, to show my girlfriend where I live when not at Uni.

Out comes her wrinkled, begging hand. We turn out our pockets and find nothing. I offer her a smoke and she pulls on it like an unearthly vacuum. A candle of light in an eternity of darkness; where it is always winter and perfect snow is black beyond belief. Nothing left. The mouth of the station swallows her descending, ambiguous frame. Light another joint. We are pushing reluctant time forward as it digs its heels in at the dusty smells and sounds of old stories, at the sucking of smoke, at our involuntary shivers.

She's back again. The wrinkled hand, heavy with pleading, is now answering. She drops four warm coins into my palm and says, "Get yourselves a cup of coffee and get home by Christmas.” She turns. From her back off -white wings unfurl and flap, but no one seems to notice except me, as the station gulps her up.

~ David R. Morgan

(Leicester December 1977)